Contamination
by PikaCheeka
Summary: Snape struggles to learn of the powerful force that contaminated him, and the 'darkness' that turned his life around forever. Monologue


A/N- It's so good to be writing again! . I think for a while there I was getting depressed or something, but writing lessens it. Besides, fanfiction is calling to me. runs away in horror I'm also going mad because I've been working on this novel for ages now and I just can't get it to work out at all, so I took to writing short stories and fanfics in notebooks, and now I'm back to writing for the web. Yes, I will be back to Malfoy fics soon! My next one, no doubt. This, however, is a Snape fic. sigh I love this song, I think it has to do with most of us. Or at least me, at any rate. I like writing Snape. He's strange...like Draco, but more depressed. It scares me though, writing him. 0.o

Rating: PG- PG is safe. Aheh.

Contamination

By PikaCheeka

My room has been cleared away of mirrors. Bottles are too distorted to see into, so I have no fear of seeing something within them. But it is not void of memories. Of my bitter emptiness.

Bitter. All my life, that is the singular word I have heard when people discussed me, even when I was young. Even when I was too young to BE bitter, for something must happen to you to make it so. I am now, though. Sometimes I wonder if that's all I am. If the person I once was melted away and now I am nothing but this strange shell of bitterness. If I was contaminated.

I feel like I am.

It has been many years since I graduated school, and still those years haunt me. They were the beginning of my destruction. I met my enemies, the person I cared about, the person who left me, and the stupidest choice I have ever made in my life. Those were the years of James, Remus, Sirius, and Peter. Those were the years of Lily. And Voldemort.

I have been told by other professors that I am ill in some manner, that I need to sleep. But I can not. These seething bits of irony that have become me do not allow me to forget them, to relax for even a moment. I can rarely sleep at night because of them, and, when I do, I dream about them. There is no escape, for they have become me.

I was never liked in school. I was landed in the house of Slytherin, the one I wanted, but not the one I needed. Though I am a Slytherin. The second that hat touched my head it had screamed out the word, and I had gone. Slytherin is the hated house, the house of the rejects that nobody else wanted. The other three houses were friendly rivals, but Slytherin was the house everyone wanted to defeat.

Just like I was the student everyone wanted to defeat.

I made friends in Slytherin, or so I thought I did. But when I look back on it now I realize they were not there, and they only led me to the Dark Lord with each passing year. There was a small gang of us, and we were most likely the smartest Slytherins in the school at the time, and maybe even the smartest students. Except perhaps Lucius, a year above me, who was already detached and depressed before he even arrived. But that did not matter.

Slytherins were supposed to be that way.

Yet I couldn't accept it.

The years passed and I became well known. I was not half the prankster James was, and I was never a prefect because of my fights, but people knew me. They knew that sullen boy in the house of Slytherin with dead eyes and greasy, black hair.

James and Sirius were in Gryffindor, our most hated house. They hated me from the start. I do not know why, I can not fathom it, but I hated them as well. And for seven years we despised each other. Death threats, curses, insults, and fist fights were constantly between us, though it was always two against one. I was faster with my wand than my hand though, and I usually lost. Forced to slink back into the dungeon of my common room. Forced into hostility.

James was arrogant too. He would never admit it, nor would his son despite what I say, Harry is nothing like his father, and he never will be, but he was. He was Head Boy and he was on the Quidditch team, and he made that known. Once he reached his seventh year, he would rattle at me about how I was nothing and he was Head Boy. It only made me go mad, and turn around for support. From the other side.

He may have saved my life once, but he was not the 'hero' he is made out to be. He only saved me to keep himself from expulsion. Nobody is a hero.

At least not in my eyes. Everyone was average, and I was the villain.

I could just never accept that.

My parents were kind enough, though somewhat distant. I could never tell them my problems; I had to deal with them myself. Whose fault this is I shall never know. It is probably mine. And my friends were nothing. I sat alone, and contemplated the hostile thoughts swimming beneath the surface of my ugly mind. Understanding them was impossible, so why should they know?

I am repeating the common lament of thousands, but I can't help wondering if it is seriously true for me. I traded. I gave up everything a human needs for nothing. For blank, cold, emptiness. I made sure nobody cared about me. I made sure nobody loved me. I was indifferent to everyone, and after a time this nothingness was returned. And I knew that deep down I DID want to be left alone, and I suppose that is what makes me so different from everyone else.

It suited me, it still does. But I want to know what life would have been like if I had not done that. I want to know what _life_ if like. It is too late to change though.

_And I knew that deep down I DID want to be left alone, and I suppose that is what makes me so different from everyone else... _I never noticed how lonely it was until it was too late.

By the time I was only fifteen I had accomplished what I wanted. My friends couldn't be friends anymore. I was nothing to be friends to. My parents gave me up for the depressed and left me to my own devices. My professors stopped asking me if I was all right. Even if anyone did, even if anyone pretended to care. It did not matter.

I recognize the student Draco now as someone like me when I was younger. Except that I wanted to be empty, and he does not. But there is no escape either way. It deadens you inside out.

But now I wonder if I wanted it after it happened. I know I wanted it before it became true, but after? After that I was alone. And I had made it that way. Because I wanted it. I wanted the one thing so many did not want.

And because I got my way once, I shall never get it again.

My bitterness had worn me thin.

It is something that can never heal. You can not heal an emptiness. Some say it can be done, but I know it is not so.

And even if it could be, there is the bitterness. Bitterness, in my opinion, is a high form of jealousy. That is what it is for me, though it contorted itself over time to hatred. A dull ache of rage that would never leave me, and is still here.

James had everything I didn't have, it seemed. I would never be Head Boy because he was. I would never be on the Quidditch team because I was incapable on what he could do. I was never athletic, I was only smart. But that wasn't what I wanted then.

He also had Lily.

It seems most people I have known liked her at some point, but that does not matter. At least, it did not then. Lily Evans. I never used to pay attention to her.

But maybe I did. I never let on much, not even to myself.

It only surfaced when James came into the picture, and seemed to steal her away. I was not entirely like Lucius, who watched her from afar and never spoke to her, not even spitefully. I was more of the angry kind, not the depressed.

The bitter kind.

I remember waking up some mornings and just wanting to turn around and stay there, in the empty sleep, forever. I could not be hurt then, and I did not have to think. I did not have to think about the sun shining overhead while my own world was a permanent shade of gray. But I could never avoid it.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust

Sometimes I feel like giving up

Sometimes I feel like giving up

I saw her often enough, and was disgustingly cruel to her. I did not know how to act, for I had to be indifferent. So I hated everyone, and, when that was impossible, I pretended.

She only hated me in return. Or I thought she did.

But I can not forget that last day of school. That final day when I was leaning against a tree and looking over the lake silently, wondering when I would ever see it again. The Gryffindors were off somewhere. I could hear them laughing, but I ignored them. They disgusted me. They were happy. And I had to be indifferent, so I could not be.

I was contemplating giving everything up, as well. I was a Death Eater by then, and I was struggling with myself. Was I to remain one and give up the rest of my life as a normal person? Or was I to break away, risk extreme torture and death, and try to live?

If I ever could.

I also wanted to give up on life. Then there would be nothing left. Nothing to match my soul.

She came to me then, out of nowhere, it seemed. I just heard a noise and stiffened, afraid to turn. But then she was in front of me. She looked at me for a long, pitying moment.

"Severus?" she finally said.

I grunted to acknowledge the fact I knew she was there.

"I just wanted to say...to say I was sorry." She stammered.

I had not been expecting that. I remember jumping up and saying loudly, "About _what_?" in a decisively bitter tone. Like everything of myself

But she was gone. She was already running back up to the school. To pack her things and walk out of my life forever. And into James's.

She is dead now, as is James. Yet, to have both of them be alive again, it would be worth it. I believe so. Voldemort has returned again at any rate. And I, once again, am risking my life every second as a spy for the good.

It was those last words she spoke to me that caused me to change over. I told Dumbledore that afternoon, everything, very rushed, angry. And I accomplished something, something that would smooth over my past years of evil. I became a spy for the Ministry.

But it did not save me from the bitter anger. Nothing could save me from that.

And nothing could save me from Lily. I can not forget her. I can not forget how cruel I was to her, and to her friends, my enemies. Every day I remember, and every night I resent it. I find nothing but deep disgust for myself when these memories come. Not only because I was so cruel, but because it ever happened. Some say love is the most powerful thing in the world. Others say it is the most dangerous weapon ever to have fallen into the hands of man. It is neither. It is merely empty. Stupid. It contaminates you, murders you, and you can never understand why, for it does it in such a way it doesn't hurt until it hits you ages later. Hits you that whatever you do, it won't matter. Because nobody will ever love you. Nobody.

That's what hurts most of all.

I still argue with myself. Whose pride was it? Whose pride was it that destroyed me? I used to believe it was his, but now... Now I am beginning to realize it is mine. It was my fault, all of it. Every stupid thing I ever did was my fault.

My fault I was not on the team...

My fault I was not Head Boy...

My fault I was made bitter...

My fault I never spoke to Lily the correct way...

My fault I became a Death Eater...

But then, I am not the same person I once was. I am older now, a professor at Hogwarts. I see hundreds of students. Some are like me, some are like Lily, some are like James.

And I am different because I gave up my pride.

I gave up my pride in being a Death Eater and became a spy, nothing to be proud about. I gave up false pride in my athletic ability. I gave up everything.

Except my bitterness, though that is something I can never be proud about.

I know people like me who were like me, who went off and killed themselves because they could not take it any longer. I know people like myself who stayed Death Eaters because they needed to be able to hurt something that was not their own. We're all going to die some day, and how you choose to go out is your own belief. It is usually wrong though.

Pride and bitterness are enemies. If left alone, they shall kill one another. Because they can also die. Die with you.

This bitterness is a contamination, a disease. It consumes you and never lets you back into that person who you once were.

Yet pride is an even uglier one. Pride doesn't hurt, unlike bitterness. It actually makes nothing hurt. Until you realize that you will one day die. And then your pride will not have mattered.

But bitterness only welcomes death. I am waiting.

And I am going to fight.

_To fight_


End file.
